What is Sharding?

Sharding is a database partitioning technique that separates very large databases into smaller, faster, more easily managed parts called data shards. Each shard contains only a subset of the data, but is self-sufficient and operates independently. This improves performance by distributing the load across multiple machines, reduces latency, and simplifies database management. Sharding is commonly used in large-scale applications and databases to handle high traffic and massive data volumes.